Thursday’s Best Reviewed: Archer

It’s clowns over clones, dark satire besting earnest intrigue, as Archer takes the night in the first installment of a two-parter featuring killer clowns at a fundraiser — and pokes fun at its own characters’ lack of empathy. The remainder of the night hovers around a “B” grade, with DC’s Legends of Tomorrow‘s time-traveling superheroes at the bottom rung for a second week in a row. Notably, recent critical whipping-show Scandal bounces back with an episode Vulture‘s Phoebe Robinson — who’s also a wonderful comedian, TV writer, and co-host of the excellent 2 Dope Queens podcast with the incomparable Jessica Williams — calls “a vast improvement over last week’s boo-boo episode.”

While from the outside, Archer may seem a silly spy spoof, but anyone who’s watched the show knows its charm lies in its love of language — well, along with its embrace of its goofiness, love of the genre, and its penchant for making the vulgar delightful. Vulture‘s Charles Bramesco highlights Archer‘s linguistic acrobatics in his review of “Bel Panto, Part 1”: “The dialogue nests phrases within phrases, ideas within ideas, mimicking the informal patterns of actual human speech.” William Hughes at AV Club initially has trouble pinning down what’s so special about this episode, but ultimately divines its that the show achieves its apex when “they transplant the show’s entire cast into a foreign, confined setting, a configuration that gives them a), new people to use in their ongoing efforts to destroy each other, and b), the opportunity for everyone to get intimately involved in the caper of the week.”